


it's hard to get around the wind

by suguday (rockholdjk)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, Flowers, Homophobia, M/M, Memory Loss, PTSD, Panic Attacks, Period Typical Attitudes, Trauma, gratuitous slaughterhouse five references, people who love flowers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 19:26:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7187000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rockholdjk/pseuds/suguday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The soldier wakes up in Kneyanskche.</p>
<p>Steve draws in Brooklyn.</p>
<p>They meet again at a flower shop.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it's hard to get around the wind

**Author's Note:**

> Hey all! This is my first fic (EVER!) so please be a bit easy on me. Constructive criticism is always welcome. It's a bit on the shorter side, and it's not my best work, but I was excited to get things rolling, so please excuse me. A few things before we get started-- 1) Kneyanskche is a fictional town in Siberia. 2) Suguday is a Russian meal made of raw whitefish. 3) This is not a beta'd chapter.
> 
> Please enjoy! There is more to come soon.

Kneyanskche was not victim to time. 

It froze with the cold, with a sun that didn’t rise for two months of the year. 

The soldier, unlike the poor, filthy пизда that lived there did not feel the winter. Siberia was a very cold place, but he was colder still.

There was a dull ache inside his ribs. He could swear there was a spider, one that dripped venom, with a black underbelly, where his heart should be. The spider used to crawl around, twitching its long legs, but the soldier knew it had died. It rested in his chest, cold and unmoving, an unturned stone. 

He did not know what he was doing in Kneyanskche. One afternoon, an afternoon covered in pristine, killing snow, he woke up in a bed. He was underneath a sweaty, sweltering mess of fur blankets, a Sig Sauer P226 tucked into his waistband. He saw nothing but gray, chipping walls, a shoddy radiator in the corner, and hundreds of thousands of rubles packed away in a nondescript suitcase. 

He did not know what he was doing in Kneyanskche, but he stayed anyway, because he had nowhere else to go. 

* * *

The soldier did not bother to learn the names of the few people that lived in Kneyanskche. He simply bought suguday from them when needed, procured adequate clothing in order to minimize attention, and contemplated killing them all each morning that he woke. 

The need to kill radiated deep in his bones. His fingers twitched at night, tightening around invisible necks, urging to break frail wrists and curl into a deadly fist. 

He had succumbed to the need once, in the early, dim light of the morning. He had picked an old man, one that wouldn’t be noticed missing in Kneyanskche, just one that would satisfy this burning. 

The soldier had only noticed the old man out twice in the town—both times, he sat in the market building, his hands clutching a steaming cup of disgusting, bitter coffee. 

He watched as the man bled out into the snow, 10 miles out of town. He watched the light slip out of the man’s eyes like a sunset. He turned and vomited.

Fuck. Fuck. 

He woke up days later to a broken radiator and a stupid fucking head that wouldn’t stop whirling and buzzing and thinking. Something was eating at the edges of his brain and that thing would never stop being hungry.   
Guns. Electricity crackling. Not in the air but no, no, in his face. His face was breaking apart and coming back together—he was sure the veins in his flesh arm were tying themselves together, trying to kill him. 

He wished it would, but the soldier, just like the snow, could not be killed—it could only kill others.

He tried to fuck it away with one of the girls in Kneyanskche, one that had long blonde hair that he pulled and deep blue eyes that he couldn’t look into.

She always lit a cigarette after, the smoke twisting lazily, a serpent in the air. She wore nothing but a fur coat.

“Where are you from?” she asked. She would look at him, her tone uninterested but her eyes curious. “How old are you?”

There was no point in answering. It would be dangerous to tell her, even if he knew.

“Funny,” she would say. “Most men here, they fuck like animals, but you, you fuck like a real man, and you’re the only one that is a ghost.”

The back of his eyes burned. 

When she asked her name, he told her it was Anisim, and fucked her again until his eyes stopped hurting and the water stopped coming out.

* * *

After 134 days, 536 hours of sleep, 200 meals, thirty fucks, and one kill, after returning from shooting practice in the open fields of snow, the soldier (Anisim, he remembered) tossed his gun into his bed, wrapped fur around his body and burnt his house to the ground.

He left Kneyanskche when he did know what he was doing. When things become too comfortable, they become dangerous. The soldier did not want danger anymore, so he had to go.

He blinked at the harsh light in Moscow, the poisoned air settling heavily into his lungs.

“Куда бы ты хотел пойти?,” the woman at the counter asked. “Where would you like to go?” she asked again, in unsure English, when he didn’t respond.

He did not know what made him say it, but the words rolled off his tongue.

“New York,” he said. “I want to go to New York.”

 

* * *

Steve picked up a sketchbook for the first time in 70 years.

The pencil was unfamiliar yet comforting in his hand—after all this time, drawing was seared into his muscle memory like a particularly bad burn. 

The paper was better now. Growing up, he drew on anything he could find—dirty scraps of newspaper, old, mustard-stained napkins, the bottom of his mother’s shoes before she died. This sketchbook was full of creamy, canvas sheets that seemed too clean.

He didn’t want to draw anything in particular, so he just drew what he knew was real. The twisted wrapper of taffy that they used to buy back in the 40s when his mom worked an extra hour or few at the factory, the Irish cross that had been sent back with his dad’s body from the army. The sharp crack of the baseball as it made contact with the bat at a Mets game. A cigarette, hanging out of a mouth, and not just anyone’s mouth, but Bucky’s—

He slammed the sketchbook shut and went for a run. 

Running felt good. Sweat was good. The burn of his lungs was good.

Brooklyn was particularly hot that day, and the sun beat down with a furious energy that turned Steve’s skin pink. 

Even Captain America can sunburn, apparently, he thought. He paused at a bench to tie his shoe, sending a quick text to Sam.

TO: SAM

Hey man, I guess I can sunburn. Funny that I’m just now figuring this out three years out of the ice.

His phone buzzed almost immediately.

FROM: SAM

Well Cap, can’t have that now can we ? Lunch @ Bailey’s ? Gotta keep your precious white ass out of the sun

Steve chuckled silently to himself.

TO: SAM

Thanks man, but I’m actually going to go visit mom. I’ll catch up with you tomorrow.

He shoved his phone back into his pocket and started to jog in the direction of the flower shop on 11th. Once a month, made a point of taking fresh flowers to his mother’s grave. That was one thing he appreciated—even though he missed out on several decades, he could still go talk to his mom. 

It took him only a few minutes to get to Angelo’s Flowers, a fairly plain shop with green awnings and floor-to-ceiling glass windows in the front. 

“Hi Mrs. Donnelly,” he greeted, the bell on the door signaling his arrival.

“Oh, Steve,” Mrs. Donnelly cried, her long gray hair looking frizzier by the second. “My boy, it’s so good to see you, like always!”

He laughed, pulling her in for a quick hug.

“Of course Mrs. Donnelly, I wouldn’t go to just any flower shop in New York.” 

“Just the usual today?”

“Yes ma’am, just the usual.”

She picked out 7 white tulips and wrapped them into a small bouquet. 

“That would be $14.86.”

He slipped her a twenty-dollar bill and crowed at her to keep the change, grabbing the flowers and slipping out of the shop before she could protest.

The air felt different in Brooklyn today, so much that he almost made the wrong turn to the cemetery. There was an energy thrumming underneath his skin, one that he hadn’t felt in a while.

He felt eyes on his back, and whirled around, fist tightening around the bouquet of flowers, but was only met with an elderly couple curled up onto a bench, nestled together like seashells.

It began to rain.


End file.
